Jun 14 Clutter raises $64 million for on-demand storage

Excited to share the continued momentum of my friends and client at Clutter, raising a seriously impressive $64M to continue expansion of the business. I've been working with this great team since they were a few people coming out of the Amplify accelerator in Venice and has been a pleasure helping them strategically align their business plan with unique real estate strategy as we navigate the growth cycle. They are a transformational business and excited to see where it goes from here!

If you heard venture investors were pouring tens of millions into storage, you might think it was cloud storage or flash storage. But that’s not the kind of storage we’re talking about with Clutter.

The Los Angeles-based startup, which helps customers store their physical belongings like clothing and furniture, has closed a $64 million funding round from big name investors. The series C is led by UK-based Atomico with participation from Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures (GV) and Fifth Wall.

Clutter picks up and delivers your items on demand and everything can be arranged online. They aim to make storing your belongings as convenient as possible.

If this sounds familiar it’s because MakeSpace, Omni and Trove also raised money for similar concepts. Apparently, the market opportunity is big!

“Storage is a large industry that has not been optimized or refined by technology,” Sequoia partner Omar Hamoui told TechCrunch. He believes there’s “room for more than one of these companies to be there.”

It turns out that people have a lot of stuff. And they don’t like going to warehouses to retrieve their items. Conjuring your ski equipment with the tap of a button is appealing to consumers.

Plus, since they are bringing their items to you, they can rent facilities in less desirable locations. That saves a lot of wasted real estate money.

Yet Clutter insists they are unlike the other startups in the space because they have better unit economics. (I cannot confirm this comparison because they have not shared their financials.)

Says Mir about Clutter, they’re “not only profitable on every individual customer, but we’re producing a gross profit in every single city we operate in.” Revenue is in the tens of millions, but the overall business is not profitable.

Right now they are focused on adding new cities. They’re already in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Seattle, Santa Barbara, San Diego and Orange County. Now they want to expand internationally.

That’s part of the reason they partnered with Atomico. “We had so much conviction around the team and the business,” said Hiro Tamura, partner at Atomico. He says they intend to be a “huge part” in helping Clutter move “beyond the borders of the U.S.”

Everyone involved with Clutter believes they have what it takes to challenge Public Storage, a $35 billion public company. When asked if they might IPO someday, Mir didn’t hold back. “100%. there’s no way in hell we’ll ever sell this company.”